Freeplay Zero unresponsive

[mason.wm.richins@gmail.com]

Hey Mason!  Yes, this is quite odd, really.  It almost sounds as if your Raspberry Pi is overheating or something, but that is also odd.

Did you solder the pins on the Pi yourself?  If so, can you show us a photo of that area?  If there was a pin that was improperly soldered or soldered to a neighboring pin, it could potentially cause random problems like this.

It is very rare, but I have also heard of people having a Raspberry Pi that's bad.  If you have another Pi Zero to try, it may be worth testing.

It's also worth going through https://www.freeplaytech.com/support/troubleshooting/ to see if anything there catches your eye as a potential issue.

Hey, thanks for the reply! 

I'm not sure if it's overheating, since it with often be unresponsive or pop up errors right once the pi turns on. The last time I tried, the power switch even stopped responding and I had to disconnect the battery to power it down. I stopped turning it on to prevent corrupting the sd card after that happened.

I did solder the pins on myself. I'm not sure if you can see the solder that well in the photo but it doesn't look like any of the solder is linking pins together. I can't say if there are any cold joints though (this was my first time soldering so it's possible). Lol I hope the excess flux isn't a problem... I applied it a bit to generously since I haven't used it before.

I do slightly wonder if the raspberry pi is the culprit actually. Before I soldered the pins on and put it in the freeplay zero, I tried using it with my tv (with an unmodded retropie) and got a somewhat similar result. When trying to configure my controller, I either couldn't enter any buttons or the buttons would stop responding after a few button configurations.

Is there anything you'd recommend me trying?